Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race

by Margot Lee Shetterly

Though many competitors within the US government were vying to lead the space effort—among them the US Air Force, the US Naval Research Observatory in Washington, DC, and Wernher von Braun and the Germans who ran the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama—it was the NACA that was chosen as the repository for all of America’s disparate space operations. The NACA—civilian and innocuous, abundant in engineering talent—was the perfect container. In October 1958, with Mother Langley as the nucleus, the US government fused all the competing operations, along with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, into the NACA. The expanded mission called for a new name: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA.